Because I hear so many couples in therapy describe how they spend their time, I see how tapping on iPads and watching television diminish our opportunities to relate to and care for another person. We get used to the simplified, the superficial, the sensational; We turn to endless stories of celebrity relationships and online drama instead of engaging with our own. As political scientist Robert Putnam points out in *Bowling Alone, *“Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real-world counterpart, Internet contact becomes dishonest, dishonest, and strange”.
There is also a chicken and egg factor here. I maintain that isolation is an effect of our obsession with technology, but increasing social isolation also creates this obsession.
More than any other time in human history, we live alone: in 1950, only four million people in the United States lived alone; In 2012, more than 30 million did so. That’s 28 percent of households (the same percentage as in Canada; in the United Kingdom, it’s 34 percent). As New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg observes of these rising statistics, “a remarkable social experiment” is occurring.
How does this change fit into the “design” of the creature we call a human being?
Western society has long held the view that we are essentially isolated and selfish creatures who need rules and limitations that force us to be considerate of others. Today we are drawing a diametrically opposite portrait: humans are biologically driven to be associative and altruistic beings who respond to the needs of others. It seems we should be called empathic homo.
Empathy is the ability to perceive and identify with the emotional state of another person. The word, coined in the 20th century, derives from the Greek *empatheia, *meaning “affection” and “suffering.” But the concept was first developed by 19th century German philosophers who gave it the name *Einfühlung, *which means “to feel in.” Study after study shows how strong that ability is in human beings.
Perhaps most fascinating is research showing that simply imagining or thinking that another person is suffering (especially a loved one) causes us to respond as if we were going through the exact same experience. Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues at the University of Zurich found that when a woman received a small electric shock on the back of her hand, the woman next to her, who did not receive any shock, reacted as if she had also been shocked. received: the same The pain circuit was activated and the same area of the brain lit up in both women. We literally suffer for others.
